The IT budget decline in first quarter of 2009 returned IT budgets to near 2007 levels, said Gartner earlier today. Their recent survey of 900 CIOs showed 42% of respondents reduced their budgets in the first quarter of 2009.

“CIOs reported that renegotiating vendor contracts and head count reductions were the primary focus areas for accommodating budget reductions,” said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP. “CIOs report shifting more work to in-house resources and delaying capital expenditures more than reducing IT project investments.”

The survey found that CIOs expect the economy to recover between the first and third quarter of 2010. CIOs plan to increase IT investment projects and workforce levels as their first investments in such a recovery. Software, hardware and infrastructure investments are also high on the CIO’s agenda on the path to economic recovery.

A great sense check has been put on the web by the US organisation the Business Marketing Institute (BMI.) Called “Are you really reaching your reader? 20 questions to consider” the article focuses on how, in a “content is king” world, you can give your campaign or content real traction.

The BMI’s 20 questions amalgamated a number of checks against which to review your content for focus and appropriateness. It recommends the creation of “persona” of the recipient before approaching them – to ensure message and fit are absolutely right.

This makes a lot of sense – we’ve had many CIOs say to us “don’t assume I want technical content”, many seemingly time-poor executives happily read detailed 3 page letters that have broken all the “traditional” rules of direct marketing – all because the understanding of the target market and the journey they needed to be taken on was exactly right.

The very good Buyer Persona Blog recommends building formal buyer personas for each of your target demographics, and lists ways to go about achieving this.

And, just as importantly, can it communicate the fact that it’s satisfied the business when it’s got there?

The Forrester blog for CIOs is arguing that “old IT” (famous for one size fits all and blowing the budget according to Forrester) is dead. The new IT (from a silo mentality to a cross-functional business technology enabler) is apparently gaining ground rapidly.

But Forrester still perceives a gap between the business’ expectations of IT, and the perceptions of IT in the enterprise. It thinks this gap stems from a lack of decent IT governance (meaning CIOs are playing catch up on expectations) and that IT-to-business relationships are not as solid as they could be (highlighting that IT is not actively managing its clients). The author claims that “defining and marketing the portfolio of business technology services are critical competencies, as they set the objectives for the business-IT communications.”

This chimes with a point that Wyeth’s CIO made at our recent S&M Forum event - that she has funded post-project internal marketing activity to ensure a wider understanding of that project within the business and celebrate the success of the newly implemented technology. Certainly worth building in to every post-live ABM plan.

CIO Magazine’s CIO 100 for 2009 has just been released and makes interesting reading. The CIO 100 lists the one hundred companies that are creating business value by innovating with technology. Featuring high profile firms such as BP and Wyeth, through to smaller innovators such as Vail resorts and Midland Memorial Hospital, the survey goes into good detail about the BPM, SOA, CRM, Marketing, BI and ERP (and other) IT projects perceived to be truly innovative.

Useful detail is available on each project – for example Pfizer’s recent implementation: “Pfizer launched a voice-directed order picking solution within a regulated and validated pharmaceutical environment. Warehouse workers wear a lightweight, battery-powered device that connects to a Wi-Fi network, through which they can hear verbal commands that direct them to the location of a product. Pfizer says the system has reduced pick errors by 57 percent, which reduces the quantity of orders being returned. It has also saved 10 percent of costs due to overtime and reduced training time by 50 percent. Workers achieve maximum speed and productivity in four weeks rather than two months.”

This month the CIM unveiled a survey to help marketers in the boardroom. Entitled “Marketing’s Decline: A Wild Exaggeration?” it is reportedly designed to help marketers strengthen their influence and value in the firm.

Reporting on the release of the study in Marketing Week, the CIM released  few statistics:

• 74% of CFOs agree marketing has its place in an organisation they also say that the marketing department’s primary responsibility is marketing decisions and nothing else
• Both CFOs and CMOs also agree that marketers rarely show how their customer needs can be taken into account in strategy (79%). They also agree that marketers “are failing to engage both the analytical and creative side of their brain” while many feel their marketing lacks “novelty” and promotional strategies are routine
• Interestingly, CFOs have a higher regard for the quality of information processed by the marketing department than marketers themselves (65% versus 51%)
• The paper suggests that the marketing department must make sure that it is viewed as a facilitator that helps the whole organisation realise “that their business survives and thrives by serving customers.”
• The marketing team needs to stress customer proximity and the ability to convert this to commercial opportunities. It also needs “to get out of its silo and to champion customer needs across the firm and insure that customer needs are a foundation of corporate strategy.”

Finextra reported a new Forrester study today, which concludes that “Oracle and Temenos are set to continue their dominance of the core banking technology market as smaller rivals fall by the wayside and banks take a cautious approach to vendor selection in a consolidating market.”

The ongoing economic crisis is likely to accelerate an emergent trend towards consolidation among core banking tech vendors says Forrester. As the stragglers are picked off by the dominant players, the big are likely to get bigger and a smaller number of banking platform vendors will start to dominate the market even more than the top ones do today.

As such, it will be more important than ever before for banks to scrutinise the viability of banking platform vendors and their product lines in terms of regional and global success as well as product road maps, says Forrester.

A recent eBook by Nigel Edelshein called “Don’t Cold Call. Social Call” covers the thorny subject of using social networking to prospect for leads.

Despite the title of the eBook, the central argument is that telemarketers need to do their homework before they begin ringing their contacts – as we learned at the S&M Forum earlier this week, senior IT buyers still find telemarketing to be an effective method, but unprepared cold calling is an ineffective use of telemarketers’ talents. 

Edelshein outlines six factors that he believes determine what gets salespeople through the door:

1. Product – you need a good product that offers value to your target market; if you can’t offer value, your buyers will not be interested in meeting with you.

One thing that might work best to underscore the value of your product in these economic times is provocation marketing.  As I discussed in “Lead gen in a downturn: is provocation the answer?”, provocation is most effective when it anticipates a problem that the customer is experiencing but has not yet put a name to – the aim is to identify a high-impact issue, develop an original point of view, lodge your provocation and prove your point.

2. Message- Edelshein believes salespeople have no more than 15 seconds to effectively communicate an introduction.  The elevator pitch needs to be concise and “all about the prospect” – not about you or your company, just about the value that your product can deliver for your prospect right now.

Chris Cottam of HP advocated this when I spoke to him recently (see “How do you get onto a senior buyer’s consideration list?”).  He told me, “If you stop many sales people and ask them about an elevator pitch they understand the principal, but can they actually deliver it?.  No… It’s crucial that you know exactly what you’re going to say to them in that 30 seconds or one minute.”

3. Repetition of message- the message has to be repeated across different mediums; as Edelshein puts it, “different people react differently to different media… we need to try reaching people in a variety of ways – not just keep pounding away on one ‘frequency’.” 

 Edelshein points to research that says that we may need to see a message as many as seven times before we remember seeing it – as I pointed out in my post “The case for multi-touch campaign marketing”, prospects often need to receive multiple “touches” before they are ready for a sales meeting.

 4. Talking to the right people – don’t just sell to the CEO/CXO; the aim is to get through to anyone in your target company that is involved in buying your product.  MarketingSherpahas recently reported that for a product that costs more than $25,000 being sold to a company with 1,000+, there are 21 people involved in the buying process.  Edelshein recommends being in contact with all of them.

Claire Myerson, speaking at the S&M Forum earlier this wee, relayed an anecdote about telemarketing – she took a phone call from a salesperson who explained that he had been researching her company and didn’t want to waste her time, and would like to know what he could do to get a meeting with her – his approach was honest and humble, and Claire agreed to find time to meet him.

 5. Using changes in the buyer’s environment- buyers who are comfortably in their status quo don’t buy because there is no pain causing a need for your product.  Make the most of trigger events such as new executives, mergers and acquisitions, new products (theirs or their competitors’) or external factors such as the economy.  Edelshein recommends keeping tabs on your prospects by reading their press releases – “you can set up Google Alerts to monitor press releases that contain the name of your target companies… and have news items emailed to you.”

Google News can be a great starting place for information, as can analyst blogs such as TechMarketView.  Knowing the forces that are affecting your target companies is a great way to begin to engage with your prospects, but press releases need to be balanced by independent news reports.  I’d also recommend trying to find any blogs written by employees that could give you an ‘inside scoop’ on what’s going on that isn’t being reported on.

6. Use your relationships – if you don’t have a relationship with a senior buyer in your target company, you can begin establishing a relationship by using social networks to connect to them.  However, it’s important to remember that relationships established online need to be “realised” by contacting or meeting the person offline.

One method to try is getting introduced to and connecting with prospects on LinkedIn and seeing what events they’re listed as going to.  Once you’ve put a “face to the name”, getting in contact with your prospect becomes much easier and the conversations you have more likely to deliver value to you (by allowing you to be more successful in your sale) and your prospect (by allowing you to more effectively solve their problems).

The McKinsey Quarterly has recently released an article called Memo to the CEO: Why we need an annual report for technology. It is premium content, but its broad premis is that to get the IT organisation and the business units more in tune, CIOs could suggest to the CEO that they jointly issue a technology annual report to the business.

McKinsey writes the memo from the CIO to the CIO, suggesting ”The idea is quite simple: you and I would jointly issue an annual report for technology—something analogous to the annual report for investors and the broader market. This document would not only provide a candid overview of our ability to extract business value from technology but also substantiate that analysis with hard metrics. We would share perspectives on the challenges of technology, convey our ideas about its role in our company, celebrate achievements, and articulate our plans and visions for the future.”

Whether this takes off within organisations remains to be seen – but I would suggest that IT companies could use this approach themselves – creating an “annual report” for the client based on the account plan they have, and the way they see their technology and services being taken forward within the account. They could map the annual report against the key goals laid out by the Chief Exec and Chairman in the organisation’s real annual report. It’s a great way to show early commitment and understanding.

There was much debate at last night’s S&M Forum about the increasing usage of the “participative” web by CIOs. Both our our CIO speakers (CIOs from Reuters and Wyeth) mentioned that they use Twitter, blogs, and other 2.0 type media to find information to help keep abreast of trends. They also mentioned that both had come under increasing pressure to allow the organisation as a whole to interact with the company’s brand communities via these tools – their consumers were increasingly demanding it

This chimed with a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “Getting Brand Communities Right” which discusses the huge success of Harley-Davidson in this arena. So if Wyeth, Reuters and Harley are doing it so well, why can’t IT companies? The answer, or one of them, seems to reside in the HBR article – where the author says, “Too often, companies isolate their community-building efforts within the marketing function.” As a result, it’s not inclusive or authentic and the IT companies’ business audiences are turned off. As Wyeth’s CIO said at the event last night, ” if the blog or content sounds like a corporate push then it turns me off immediately.”

The same goes for any really successful marketing initiative – the thing that’s remarkable is that it’s so rarely anything to do with pure marketing, it’s something that comes out of the business that marketing can build on. If marketing isn’t playing a role to spot (or create) these opportunities and react to them, then it’s always likely to be hamstrung. However many communities it tries to build, it’ll never be the B2B Harley-Davidson.

This ties in with HBR’s interview with Fiat’s CEO, who says: “There was also a lot of young talent locked up in marketing and other functions that historically were not considered high-potential career paths. The guy who runs the Alfa division now is 40 years old. The guy running the Fiat division is 42. Neither has an engineering background, but both were first-rate consumer-products marketers, and the company sorely needed their talents.” Based on what our CIOs were saying last night – that their successors are the 20-somethings with the mix of marketing savvy and technical wizardry – it won’t be at all long before an interview with an IT CEO says the same thing.

CIO magazine’s interview with John Connolly, Tube Lines’ director of information, highlights a growing trend for IT to sit outside its more traditional remit and to encompass the wider information needs of the business.

“He is the first person in his position at Tube Lines to sit on the executive committee and with a head of information management, Liz Scott-Wilson, having recently been appointed, and a head of IT, Adrian Davey, already in situ, he feels he has the team to address both opportunities and problems.

“Before, you either worked for the FD or the chief executive and IT reported to the FD,” Connolly says. “That’s OK if you’re trying to run IT as a back-office transactional service but if the dilemma is how you manage information, it’s not such a good place.”

That level of executive intimacy and freedom to focus gives Connolly the opportunity to drive the information agenda at Tube Lines, a key aspect of which is organising the reams of content implicit in upgrading track, stations, signals, and trains and maintaining infrastructure.”